At 95, Daniel Aaron is going strong. He first appeared on the national stage in 1951 with Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives, a portrait-gallery of eight middle-class reformers -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Edward Bellamy, Henry George, Henry Demarest Lloyd, William Dean Howells, Thorstein Veblen, Brooks Adams (and their generally unreliable executor, Theodore Roosevelt) -- that conveyed, as he described it, a vision of "a serene and humane society where 'costs' would be calculated under a different accounting system and 'success' be weighed on a different set of scales." If a later generation of progressives -- Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Ralph Nader, Betty Friedan, Jerome Wiesner -- would shift the emphasis to other concerns, still Aaron's survey was a dependable and durable guide to an apparently ineradicable tradition.
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A Most Useful Citizen
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At 95, Daniel Aaron is going strong. He first appeared on the national stage in 1951 with Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives, a portrait-gallery of eight middle-class reformers -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Edward Bellamy, Henry George, Henry Demarest Lloyd, William Dean Howells, Thorstein Veblen, Brooks Adams (and their generally unreliable executor, Theodore Roosevelt) -- that conveyed, as he described it, a vision of "a serene and humane society where 'costs' would be calculated under a different accounting system and 'success' be weighed on a different set of scales." If a later generation of progressives -- Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Ralph Nader, Betty Friedan, Jerome Wiesner -- would shift the emphasis to other concerns, still Aaron's survey was a dependable and durable guide to an apparently ineradicable tradition.